Prof. Koorbanally is an Organic Chemist with over 25 years of experience in the fields of Natural Products and Synthetic Organic Chemistry. He works on the synthesis of hybrid organic molecules for the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific interest in quinolines, benzimidazoles and quinoxalines. His current interest is on the design, synthesis, antibacterial, antitubercular and anticancer activity of conjugate molecules, combining two or more organic frameworks or classes of compounds into a single small molecule.
Professor Koorbanally was the 2005 Colenso Scholar at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge where he worked on the biosynthetic pathways to the antibiotics, butirosin and neomycin. He featured amongst the Top 30 most published researchers in 2012, 2015 and 2016 at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. To date he has published over 180 scientific articles, with over 4500 citations, an H-index of 35 and i10 index of 117 on Google Scholar, and H index of 30 on Scopus. He graduated 26 doctoral and 27 Masters students to completion. He is currently the Acting University Dean of Research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Heterocyclic compounds play an important part in drug discovery. Many pharmaceutical drugs currently marketed contain heterocycles. In particular, Prof Koorbanally is looking at hybridising two heterocyclic scaffolds together to form a single compound with the potential to have antibacterial, antimalarial, antitubercular and anticancer activity. Active functional groups are normally used in the synthetic strategy to join the two scaffolds together.
Prof Koorbanally is currently working on the synthesis of hybrid organic molecules for the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific interest in quinolines, benzimidazoles, quinoxalines, chalcones and coumarins. His current projects involve hybridising coumarins and chalcones through a triazole linker using click chemistry. These compounds have shown interesting antibacterial activity. Coupling benzimidazoles to amino acids, and quinolines with various other scaffolds such as benzimidazoles, chalcones and thiazolidines have also proven to have interesting bioactivity. His current interest is using amino acid linkers to hybridise various combinations of quinolines, benzimidazoles, quinoxalines and chalcones.
Professor
Chemistry
Koorbanally@ukzn.ac.za
031 260 3189
